


Interim

by cassyl



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: F/F, Missing Scene, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-05
Updated: 2015-02-05
Packaged: 2018-03-10 15:55:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3296147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassyl/pseuds/cassyl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After all, one can’t throw a man out a window without attracting some notice. She needs to be gone before anyone comes to investigate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interim

**Author's Note:**

> Missing scene for episode 1. Believe it or not, this has taken me that long to write.
> 
> Many, many thanks to [tartanfics](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tartanfics/pseuds/tartanfics) and [radialarch](http://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/pseuds/radialarch) for looking over this.

For a moment, standing there at the broken window, she is nothing more than her breathing as it starts to slow. The noise of the El as it makes its rattling progress along its tracks seems to pass straight through her.

And then: _Colleen_. The thought startles her like a voice saying her own name.

It seems to take forever to cross the room. Her cheeks are already wet, though she doesn’t realize it. Her knees grow weak, so that she has to sit down on the edge of the bed they shared, and then she finds she is really crying—sobbing outright like she hasn’t done since she was a child. It engages her whole body, stomach clenching, shoulders shaking. Mucous collects in the dip above her upper lip. Her eyes sting.

She feels helpless in the grip of it, and yet some part of her is objective, almost out of body, coolly dismayed at the fuss she’s making— _Get yourself together, girl_ , the voice of a woman, her mother or a teacher or an au pair, she can no longer recall, who once berated her in some long-ago corridor. How many women has she seen ridiculed for wearing their hearts on their sleeves? WACs baited in the Camp Lehigh mess by soldiers younger and greener than they, fledgling nurses scolded by hospital matrons during the Blitz. The calm, distant part of her is pointing out that she doesn’t have much time.

After all, one can’t throw a man out a window without attracting some notice. She needs to be gone before anyone comes to investigate.

Wiping her damp face on her wrist, she takes in the damage. Aside from the smashed window, it’s minimal—the beside lamp toppled, a heap of clothes disgorged from the wardrobe. The flame on the stove is still burning blue. 

She can feel the heat of Colleen’s body through her soft pink robe. With one last squeeze to her wrist, she replaces the blanket over Colleen’s face and gets to her feet. Her legs are trembling, numb, but she moves automatically. 

The first order of business is to change her clothes. She drags off her gown and slip together, then peels down the all-in-one she’s wearing underneath. In their place, she puts on a pair of slacks and a jumper, dark and soft. Their warmth is welcome in the freshly exposed the room, which has grown abruptly cold despite the mild spring weather.

Now she turns her attention to the closet. She clears out as many of her clothes as she can carry. She shoves them, hangers and all, into her duffel bag and rearranges the remaining clothes so that they’re distributed evenly across the rod instead of pushed to one side. She doesn’t pack the pink blouse Colleen gave her, doesn’t think of Colleen modeling the blue dress with the yellow flowers, eager for her opinion— _It was on sale at Gimbels, what do you think?_ How many times did she steal a glimpse of the jut of Colleen’s hips underneath her slip as she changed for work? And how many times, having looked, did she wish she hadn’t looked away? Her shoes and stockings also go into the duffel, as well as the little white gun case she kept in the dresser drawer.

Next, she moves into the toilet. The air in the little room is thick with a bitter, caustic stench, the lingering odor of the now-defused bomb. She retrieves her toothbrush from cup on the rim of the sink and culls duplicate tools and cosmetics from the medicine cabinet. Unbidden, the memory comes—Colleen leaning in the doorway, dead on her feet but eager to talk to someone about her day. It seems fantastic now to think there were days she bristled at the lack of privacy, craved silence when offered such sunny conversation. But, then, she’s always squandered what was right in front of her.

She retrieves the inactive nitromene, its faceted glass casing scarred with smoke, tucking it carefully into her purse. The supplies she used to neutralize it go back into the kitchen, where the smell of charred flesh is almost covered by the nitromene’s scalded stink. She switches the burner off, replaces the grate on the stove. The kettle she leaves where it fell, since the water pooling on the carpet would be suspicious otherwise.

She crosses the flat methodically, collecting any of her possessions that couldn’t conceivably be Colleen’s—the blonde wig from where she tossed it in the entryway, the library book she’s been reading from the bedside table, the train case of undercover equipment from on top of the wardrobe. By the time she’s cleared out her side of the wardrobe, her hands have finally stopped shaking.

Then she wipes down everything she’s ever touched: the teacups Colleen told her had been her mother’s, the delicate little bookshelf in the entryway where Colleen kept her keys and often paused to adjust her hat on the way out the door. She’s destroying evidence that could lead the police to Colleen’s killer, but it’s probably best the police don’t find themselves face-to-face with the man in the green suit. She may not know who he is yet, but it’s clear he’s no ordinary crook.

She’s ready now, should be on her way, but she can’t bring herself to move. She’s only been living here a few months, but it feels so familiar—not quite a home, maybe, but somewhere that could have been one. In a moment, it will be as if she were never here at all.

She never expected this half-life to matter so much, but she never meant for her real life to follow her here, either. She wishes she could apologize, but there’s no one left to hear her.

Outside, another train barrels by. The noise of it—its indifferent velocity—jars her into motion. Picking up her bags, she listens at the door until she’s sure the coast is clear, then shoulders her way out of the room. She does not bother to lock up. She does not look back.

The corridor is silent, as if the entire building is asleep. She hurries away, slipping down the back stairwell and out into the imperfect city dark.

She walks quickly, sticking to back alleys and side streets where she can. Once she’s put enough distance between herself and the building, she disposes of her house keys in a dustbin. She keeps her head down.

She doesn’t stop at the first hotel she passes, nor at the second. She keeps walking, moving by rote, hardly needing to look where she’s going.

When she first moved in with Colleen, she mapped the whole neighborhood by foot, committing to memory the best escape routes and likeliest boltholes. Colleen came with her on occasion, when she had the night off, never suspecting that their leisurely strolls served a dual purpose. Often they walked arm-in-arm.

The residential hotel she arrives at is just shy of fleabag, and the night clerk doesn’t give her a second glance as she passes the reception desk, enclosed in glass like a ticket booth at the cinema. She climbs the narrow stairs and lets herself into room 203. She doesn’t switch on the lights, just bolts the door behind her and drops her bags to the floor.

She hasn’t been inside this room since she first arrived in the city, when she paid six months’ rent up front in cash. She spent several hours that afternoon equipping the room to her specifications—shifting furniture out of the line of sight of the lone window, prizing off one of the bathroom tiles to hide a thick wad of money and a blank passport, wrapped in plastic, in the wall behind the sink, and tucking a pistol and a box of ammunition behind a loose panel in the back of the musty closet. The room has been waiting for her ever since—an insurance policy for situations such as this. She never anticipated needing it, but her training prepared her nevertheless.

She sinks down onto the edge of the bed. It would be a lie if she said her shoulders have not relaxed a little, that the anxious tightness in her throat has not eased. She is not proud of this. It’s no great consolation to know that always in the back of her head, she has been hedging her bets, while Colleen lost her life never knowing the risk she had undertaken simply by sharing a flat with a girl who worked at the phone company.

It was foolish, she decides—risibly stupid, really—to believe in some alternate version of her story that did not end in this room. For a little while, watching Colleen leisurely scramble eggs in her stocking feet, listening to her humming to herself in the bath, she’d convinced herself she could have it both ways.

The danger, she thinks, is in the might-have-been. It was the story she told herself of a possibility—two people sharing a pull-out bed at the same time instead of in shifts, the waxy taste of pale pink lipstick. Perhaps she didn’t really want it at all, only wanted to imagine its potential—the promise of some easy domestic idyll she could hold in reserve.

After all, wasn’t it the same with Steve? Despite the insinuations of her colleagues at the SSR, there was only ever one wind-blown, desperate kiss. There wasn’t time. She hadn’t let herself believe that there was time. She held onto the future, to what she might do when the war was over. _If, when._

She lies back on the bed without bothering to take her shoes off. She closes her eyes, listening, then not listening, to the noise of the waking city.

In a little while, she will get up and run a bath. She will wash and dress and put on her makeup in the silvered mirror above the sink. She will walk to the pharmacy on the next block over. There’s a telephone there she can use to call Mr. Jarvis. She’ll ask him to meet her at L & L—Angie has the afternoon shift today, so they won’t be disturbed. She’ll order coffee, black, nothing else.


End file.
